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A Political Disclaimer, 2016: I’m (Sometimes) Wrong

I’m seeing a fair amount of pushback, on the site and off it, to my suggestion the other day that in the wake of Hillary Clinton inevitably winning the Democratic nomination for President, a certain number for “BernieBros” will ragequit and find their way over to the Donald Trump camp. Well, two things here:

1. When Clinton does take the nomination and the first news stories about former BernieBros stomping over to Trump in a miasmic haze of disillusionment and sexism start cropping up, you know I’m going to feel smug as shit;

2. Hey, you know what? I could be wrong. And not just a little wrong but wildly out to lunch, in a profound and impactful way.

And in the case of number two there, that’s perfectly okay.

Folks, here’s the thing: When I’m writing about politics, I am (and this should be obvious) writing about it from my own perspective, which is limited both by the amount of political information I have coming in to the Scalzi Compound (and, not trivially, by the amount of time I have to think about it, considering I’m also currently writing a novel and have several other projects going), and by my own thought processes and biases. Stuff goes into my head, it rolls around in there a while, and then it comes out through my fingertips onto this page. Sometimes it might look insightful to you. Sometimes it might look like I’m snorting ketamine and cocoa powder at the same time. Sometimes it might be both!

This makes me, I should note, not better or worse than most people who comment on politics, all of whom have the same constraining factors as I do. And in politics, it should be noted, it’s not always the case that long standing in the field means one’s opinions are anything close to accurate — Shit, Bill Kristol has made a living being a pundit for decades, and he’s been spectacularly wrong on so many things for so long that it’s actually news when he gets something right. This is the open secret of being a political pundit: No one cares if you’re correct, they’re just happy when you agree with what they’re thinking. Pundits exist to ameliorate the political version of “buyer’s regret.” Yes! You did okay in falling in with Hillary/Trump/Whomever! I am a person of note confirming your choice! Well done!

I’m not a professional political pundit (at least, not at the moment), and even if I were I wouldn’t have a problem saying the following: In my political thoughts and opinions, I’m not going to always get everything right. Nor will others always agree with what I’m suggesting or how I developed my thinking process to get there. This political season I’ve already been wrong about Trump (who I expected to have peaked long before now), Sanders (who I didn’t expect to be as much of an influence as he’s had), Bush (who I assumed would be in the lead) and Rubio (who I expected to be washed out in Bush’s wake). I will be wrong again! Just you wait.

My only defense on these matters is that I’m no worse off than pretty everyone else who pundits, almost all of whom have been impressively wrong in any number of ways. I mean, show me the pundit who said three months ago that at the beginning of March, the size of Donald Trump’s penis would be a talking point on a GOP debate stage. I will follow that pundit to the ends of the earth, because he or she has a terrifying but true vision of the future, and I’ll want to know when to head to the bunker.

This doesn’t mean I don’t care if I’m wrong when I prognosticate politically. I really do try to make sense, and to reflect reality as I see it. But, again, I don’t know everything or project accurate from the data I have and I acknowledge that’s a thing. I’ve been wrong. I am wrong. I will be wrong again. I’ve also been right, am right and will be right again, too. Hopefully more of the latter than the former. We’ll see.

In any event, this is the disclaimer: My political crystal ball is cloudy, just like everyone else’s. Take what I have to say with the appropriate grains of salt, just as you should with everyone else. Be prepared for me to be wrong from time to time, just like anyone else.

And when you think I’m wrong, feel free to tell me why you think that in the comment threads. You might even be right.

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168 thoughts on “A Political Disclaimer, 2016: I’m (Sometimes) Wrong”

[Deleted because John Nemesh rather presumptuously equated “it’s okay to tell me I’m wrong” with “it’s okay to tell me what to do and how to do it.” He was wrong! Mr. Nemesh, if you want to try again without being a presumptuous twit about it, go ahead. But as a tip: You’re not actually the boss of me – JS]

I kind of thought your comments were fairly likely and along the lines of what I expected to happen as well. Could we both be wrong? Of course! It is kind of fun to see where these things are going and why and then make the best guess we can as to where they will go next, but, hey we can always be wrong!

To me, the fun of politics and all of this is the strange way it does unexpected things (so sometimes being wrong is more interesting) and the strategy behind it.

If there ever was a political pundit/talking head that was right more often then they were wrong, I’d like to know their name so I could follow them.

And here I’ll make the comment that I am just as happy as punch that you use your bully-pulpit to affect the genre-writing world. I, for one, don’t want to see you sapping some of that energy on moving the political needles.

BernieBros, huh? I guess voters with vaginas can’t vote their conscience. Please don’t use that again. It’s just rude. I’ve been a fan of Bernie, AND Kucinich, AND Wellstone, for as long as I can remember. I’d vote for them over Clinton any day.
That said – I’d never EVER cast a vote for Trump and I don’t give a shit about who the GOP puts on the ballot.

One thing that does comfort me is that 538 reports that 79% of folks voting in the primary would be satisfied with Clinton (and 62% would be satisfied with Sanders), which is pretty standard for primary polling (Clinton and Obama were around 70% in 2008) So, while there is a subset of people who want someone who brands themselves out of normal partisan politics*, most people who are showing up to the polls have a preference but feel like neither candidate is terrible.

I suspect that the loudmouths are over-represented on the Internet (as usual).

* Sanders by being an independent until last year; Trump by having no political experience (and being ambiguously partisan).

Thanks for your thoughts. I think it’s hard for people who adore your books and other writing and stances on safe and inclusive cons and such to be reminded that you might not think 100% exactly like them in all ways. Personally, I often pause and take a moment to re-focus when you remind everyone of your essentially moderate political nature in a lot of ways, despite the social progressivism. Frankly, it’s actually kind of a wonderful reminder of the growing consensus across much (though obviously not all) of the political spectrum about things like, you know, basic human decency and respect for those different from you (i.e. women, people of color, etc.).

I didn’t read your Super Tuesday post as “yay, this I the result I wanted!” I thought it was your honest assessment of how you saw things going based on your rather long history paying attention to and writing about such things. As always, your blog, you write about what you like.

*I’m basically refusing to choose in the dem primary at this point because both have problems and major good points. I’ll support whomever the Dem nominee is in the general, because the other side is insane and Supreme Court. And I’m only in the largest, richest, most reliably democratic state, so our votes don’t mean crap in the primary, I vote in June when it will already be decided.

“Bernie bro” refers to misogynist behaviors exhibition bites by some male Sanders supporters. Sanders himself has said the behavior is not okay. The term was never meant to describe all men who vote for sanders, let alone all people.

(Note: if you’re a dude and your reaction to “sometimes people oppose Clinton for misogynist reasons” is “BUT NOT ME and it’s not fair to bring it up!” that’s when I might start giving you the side eye. Not a misogynist? Cool. Invested in defensively denying the existence of misogyny? Hmmm.)

And I really wish i didn’t need to specify here that I’m intending to vote for Sanders, because it would be true either way.

Gosh! I did expect to see pushback from Berniebros but in the very first post?

I don’t have a vote so I can watch it from the sidelines, but, in the interests of making it a better world, I’d suggest Bernie’s supporters refrain from issuing orders to people who not only do not have to take orders, but are capable of flaying them metaphorically alive in a few minutes at the keyboard.

It’s an incredibly stupid thing to do, and really does not reflect well on the candidate they are supporting…

I thought every blog was understood to have a big headline that read “my OPINIONS are my own and no one else’s”. That said I really enjoy reading all your stuff and find solace in reading a celebrity opinion that for the most part validates my own thinking.
Finally, I also lean to toward Bernie Sanders, but understand that when he doesn’t become the nominee a write in vote for him is a vote FOR Trump or eventual GOP nominee and that I cannot stomach.

I predict that if you eventually turn out to be right, a whole bunch of people will start talking about it like they suddenly had this brilliant thought and ignore the fact that you said it months earlier. But I’ll know.

I like the term “Sandernistas.” Seems to bypass the (perception of) sexism that some read into the “Bernie Bros” term. (Note that I don’t think it’s a catch all term for Sanders supporters; just the Sanders supporters who talk to me or others, regardless of our well-reasoned and informed beliefs, that supporting anyone except for Sanders is foolish, ignorant, or worse. It’s the tone of condescension, not the support of Sanders himself, that defines one as a Sandernista.)

I almost posted a comment pushing back because the post didn’t quantify the impact of these “berniebros”. Do they exist? Yeah. But the two really important questions are 1) How many are there? and 2) are they really Sanders supporters (i.e. they’d vote for him in the general) and 2a) will they really vote for Trump instead?

It’s possible *I’m* wrong, but the BernieBros thing feels like a Twitter contretemps more than a substantial number of actual voters. Hell, there could be 50k of them and that would feel like a lot but it’s insignificant in terms of electoral results. And I just don’t see a lot of true Sanders supporters actually voting for Trump. The two aren’t really at all close and if someone is OK voting for Trump then, I’m sorry but I doubt they’d really have pulled the lever for Sanders. Now, some of them, perhaps most of them, might stay home, vote for a 3rd party candidate or some such other stupid gesture… but that’s different than a Trump vote.

Based on some of the people interviewed for the guardian article, there might be radicals who switch from Sanders to Trump because how the status quo is smashed is less important to them than
that it gets smashed.

I agree that there is probably a very small percentage of Bernie supporters who would vote for Trump instead of Hillary if those are the choices they’re presented with in the general. However, I think people are (predominantly) flocking to Bernie and Trump for two different reasons: although the term “angry voters” is more often associated with Trump, I think “angry” better describes Bernie supporters, and “authoritarianism” better defines the typical Trump supporter. Here’s a lengthy but worhwhile read on the topic of authoritarianism and the rise of Trump: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

If the nominees end up as Clinton and Trump, both sides will end up spending a lot of their time convincing people who supported Sanders and the other Republican candidates to vote for the party’s candidate rather than not vote or to vote for someone else. Personally, I think Clinton may have an easier time of it, especially with all the prominent Republicans recently announcing that they won’t vote for Trump for president under any circumstances. Sanders will support to Clinton, and I think some of the other Republican candidates will sit this one out, or openly support a 3rd party candidate.

JS: “show me the pundit who said three months ago that at the beginning of March, the size of Donald Trump’s penis would be a talking point on a GOP debate stage”

Don’t you recall all the fuss over the size of George W’s vice-presidential Dick? *GDRLH*

On another note, if Trumpf wins, I suppose we can look forward to Kruschev’s infamous UN performance with shoe to desk being repeated by El Donaldo. With pride, right? Because Trumpf will show off the best of America’s virtues to one and all on the world stage.

Were I part of the DNC, I’d be collecting the best (i.e., most embarrassing) video footage now and running a single attack ad 24/7 during the presidential campaign: “Aren’t you embarrassed to be considering THIS as the international face of America?”

I don’t think the BernieBros (the misogynists) will be enough of a group to counteract the BernieGirls, who will vote for Hillary.
And, if anyone ever told me the Drumf penis was part of the equation in a presidental debate just two months ago, I would have been stupified. I still am stupified. In other words, turned stupid by the stupidity.
On the other hand, if penis politics floats your boat, then the BernieBros have their candidate in the general!

I’ve never gotten the whole ‘cult of personality’ thing whether it’s politics or film or books or whatever. And I live in San Francisco where demonizing the candidate who is a member of the same party but not progressive/lefty/ enough is a typical thing. (God help you if you’re a POC but don’t follow some cause dear to a progressives little heart).
But watching the whole die-hard ‘my candidate or you’re evil’ thing this election cycle certainly does help give a clearer picture as to how people like Hitler/Putin/fill in the blank manage to rise.
My own personal take is that so far Hilary looks the ‘best’ even though politically Bernie would be my choice. If the caucus-Republicans (as opposed to regular voting Republicans) would get their act together enough to at least nominate a moderate they’d be way ahead of the game. I have Republican friends and family who are pulling their hair out over this latest drama.
I just think the next Democratic president is going to have to be a ‘take no prisoners’ type to deal with yet another round of disappointed Republicans. If it is a Democratic president any Repub elected will take the ‘I was elected by the voters to stop the socialist blah blah blah’ and it will get ugly.
But then, like our host, I could be totally wrong and the election will bring unicorns and lollipops for all.

Sanders and Trump tap similar wells of dissatisfaction, and if one is eliminated from the race, the other will pick up a non-trivial fraction of his supporters, though perhaps not a fraction sufficiently numerous to make a difference in the end.

@Bruce: “..especially with all the prominent Republicans recently announcing that they won’t vote for Trump for president under any circumstances.”

Indeed, but after all that effort, somehow the message never made it to Cruz and Rubio, who stated during last night’s 423rd Republican debate that they would support Trump if he becomes the nominee. The GOP really is smashing itself into tiny, insignificant pieces. (Hehe)

Is this how its going to be? Any time you disagree with Hillary Clinton you are a mysogynist? I am a conservative. I cannot see why Bernie Sanders socialist supporters would support republicans. They want single payer. So people who don’t want Hillary are mysoginists?

Arent a huge share of Bernie supporters College age? Don’t college age kids often go for the fresh face? Ok Bernie is old, but he wasn’t on the national scene. Plus he is all the way to the left. This is fairly typical. How come Sanders supporters can be tagged as mysoginists but Obama supporters from 2008 were not?

I don’t agree with Sanders supporters on much of anything, but thinking they are sexists? Never crossed my mind. I figured its basically ‘Same old Clinton, Sanders guy is all the way to the left and saying something different’. There also are not that many Sanders supporters. Democratic turnout is way down from 2008. If that many lefties were excited about Sanders turnout would be up.

Hillary Clinton is an old face. The Clintons have a history of lying. The FBI just gave immunity to a Clinton staffer about the emails. Guys I have done quite a bit of government contracting on government IT projects… rule 1… everything stays on government equipment. Anything remotely related to work. Period. Most corporations are like that.

If you google around you will see the Obama administration prosecuting people who leak stuff that was NOT classified, but later classified because they should have known(I would have to google for the link). That one is done as an attempt to scare people to shut up. I remember reading it and thing its BS, but appeared to be done in response to Snowden, etc… leaks. I stand by statements. If I did what Hillary did even with the low level stuff I had access to I would be fired and barred from ever doing government work again. So would you. This is before you even get into law breaking.

If any of you have buddies who work for the federal government (most tend to be liberals) ask them about email policy. The Sec of State using a person email for work on a personal server? Utterly irresponsible. The idea of ‘ease of use’? She gets laptops from the government case she works there. The IT support people are all contractors (so they can be fired for sneezing and contractors get fired ALOT). If The Sec of State had an issue with her laptop the Butt Crack guys would drop everything to help and they should. She is too important. John Kerry isn’t using a personal server. No one else in the Obama administration did this. Her doing this is utterly irresponsible at best to point of being ‘she is an idiot’. Why would you do this?

Bernie supporters don’t care about the emails… but if she gets charged, you are either looking at Bernie or Biden as the presidential candidate. Given that they gave IMMUNITY to a staffer, something is up. The Obama administration would not allow a which hunt against Hillary Clinton. The longer this goes on, the more likely Hillary Clinton is going to get charged. Even if its a misdemeanor, its a problem.

Only a complete idiot would set up your own email server as secretary of state. Its just stupid.

The sad thing about “BernieBros” is the lost potential. It could have been a cool thing, meaning “men that support gender and identity equality, which is why we like Bernie” instead of “standard douche canoe idiots.” “BernieBro” has a nice ring to it.

Anyway. John, if you want people to stop telling you what to do, this is what you have to do….

/ The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

I don’t think I was being a “presumptuous twit”, but whatever. You are entitled to do whatever you want. I disagree with you. I disagree with you using the term “BernieBros”, and I disagree with your assumption that Hillary is going to be the nominee. Have a good day.

@mike – “…the other will pick up a non-trivial fraction of his supporters, though perhaps not a fraction sufficiently numerous to make a difference in the end..”
Uh… if it doesn’t make a difference it’s trivial in any meaningful sense.

@Guess – in case you genuinely don’t know about the whole BernieBro thing, there are a number of guys tweeting that people need to support Sanders to ‘stop the harpy’ (Clinton) and similar sexist BS. I’m highly skeptical that these people are genuine Sanders supporters and not a mix of trolls, Trump supporters in disguise and jackasses who don’t really know anything about Sanders aside from the fact that he’s not Hillary. As I said before, I’ve not seen any reliable figures on how numerous these guys are; I suspect this is mostly blown out of proportion to their real numbers.

I get the general feeling that a lot of the Sanders voters are the angry voters as suggested above. I’m sure there are some who behave like assholes, just as in any other person’s camp, but I get the feeling they are angry at what they see as the machine and business as usual. Unfortunately being part of the machine and part or business as usual is one of Hillary’s big tentpole positions. That alienates a lot of them. And her camp riding the BernieBro derision and belittling does the rest. Those people are not coming back to her in the droves she wants.

Some may walk over to Trump, but I get the impression that many will just not turn out and vote at all. They were young and fresh to the market, somewhat raw in their expression of support too, but they were promised that this was a chance to change if only they voted with their conscience. That sort of disillusionment is hard to take the first time around. Which is a pity, because if everyone voted with their conscience [insert standard Greg rant here about the futility of it all] the system might actually work for a change.

The big problem is Trump is peddling something superficially similar, change and a difference from business as usual (in many ways, it isn’t all that different in the headline from Obama’s Hope and Change thing), but the devil is in the details. Of which there is certainly a lot of devil, if very little actual detail. Trump or Sanders, they want someone not the machine and Hillary is branding herself as part of that machine. Obviously those angry young voters are against her. Same as they were against Jeb and Christie, the “Moderates” of the Republican machine.

BernieBro??. A BernieBro is just someone who supported Bernie, but would then switch to Trump if Bernie is not nominated. Is that right? or is there more? (I don’t understand all the misogyny comments?)

This seems very likely to me. I would expect more Bernie supporters to go to Trump than republicans will switch to Hillary, (assuming T gets the nod.) There is a lot of anger directed towards our government and it’s seeming inability to do anything. People want a big change, whereas Hillary will be business as usual. I don’t agree with the sentiment, but I totally understand it.

I’m pretty sure that by “BernieBros”, you don’t mean “all Democrats who don’t want Hilary Clinton to be President”. I’m guessing you just mean “Democrats who happen to be misogynists”. I think that my hackles rose a bit reading that last post of yours until I realized that’s probably what you meant.

I have a Democratic friend who works and lives in the Middle East and has seen first hand how her policies have devastated – literally left homeless – many friends of his. He is equally frustrated with Obama’s drone strikes, and sees every day how they work to produce the kind of resentment that encourages terrorism. Knowing him as I do, its hard for me to love Hilary as a presidential candidate, it has me pretty worried. Not NEARLY as worried as I’ll be if Trump wins the presidency. So I’ll definitely vote Hilary over Trump any day. But I’m not going to love doing that, and I’m probably going to write a letter or two after she wins saying something to the effect of “Dear awesome and amazing President – please do your best not to make things worse in the Middle East. I realize that’s nearly impossible because things are so screwed up there… but please try.”

I remember back in 2008, the Democrats had a close primary race. It was even closer than the one we’re having now. When it became clear that Obama was going to win, there was a lot of talk on all my favorite political websites about a movement called PUMA. That was an acronym for “Party Unity My [Mild Expletive]”. It was supposedly a vast army of lifelong Democrats who supported Clinton, and vowed that they’d sit home on election day before they’d vote for Obama.

Despite all the noise on the Internet, there was no evidence in the polls or the actual voting patterns that this group ever existed. It seemed to be a really small number of people who had no life beyond posting on the Internet, and presented the illusion of being more numerous than they actually were.

There were some hints that at least some of the people involved were Ron Paul supporters trying to stir up trouble. The name PUMA is of course a pun on “cougar”, and represents Ron Paul supporters’ idea of how Hillary Clinton’s supporters would describe themselves.

How does this tie into the BernieBros phenomenon? Well, I don’t have any proof, but I’ve noticed a lot of similarities in rhetoric between BernieBros and PUMA. I’ve also noticed that they emphasize *only* the points of Sander’s platform that are similar to Ron Paul’s platform. (For example, they talk a lot about the evils of corporate money, but not as much about the need for single-payer health care.) (Obviously I’m not describing all Sanders supporters – just a particular sort of supporter that uses a particular sort of rhetoric and is more visible on the Internet than in real life.)

In conclusion: When there’s not an election going on, I see people using quite similar rhetoric to push Bitcoins, and that’s really all you need to know about them.

I imagine that a nonzero number of BernieBros will will join the ranks of Drumpf Supporters, but I would think that considerably more of them will sit on their hands on election day, the way they did in 2010 and 2014 and will likely do in 2018 even if Bernie gets the nomination and the presidency.

@Geoff Hart
“Were I part of the DNC…” – you’re assuming some degree of competence from the DNC. As the internet says, “cite please”. And also the “joke” about not being part of an organized political party, but a member of the Democratic party. Complete and utter incompetence is the norm, as far as I can tell – especially in mid-terms. Fortunately it seems in the presidential campaigns, the campaigns themselves find competent people and ignore the DNC

I was fully expecting Trump to whip it out live and on stage and challenge the others to a dick measuring contest – the really sad thing is, even that wouldn’t impact his standing at all.

@George Herold – The mysogyny comes from the fact that the BernieBros are (mostly) men who are declaring that they’ll vote for Trump rather than have “that woman” in the White House. I personally find the term BernieBro in that context to be amusing.

However, I do think there are more people who will move from Sanders to Trump who fall outside of that “no women in the White House” mindset. I personally have 5 FB friends (and I modify “friends” with Facebook specifically because they are not close friends but more acquaintances from various hobbies and groups I belong to who I have connected with) who have specifically and emphatically indicated that if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, they will vote for Trump. Not out of mysogyny but because of a variety of reasons: Hillary is too entrenched in DC politics, or she’s dishonest, or she’s been bought by outside interests. Or they think that Trump is enough of a loose cannon to be good for forcing change to a hidebound system.

I think there are more people who will “defect” from Sanders to Trump than most want to believe. Do I think there are enough to actually impact the election? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. Either way it scares me that anyone would think Trump was a valid and reasonable choice … in any circumstances.

To be honest, John, assertions by you and others that a number of Sanders people will defect to Trump reeks of the same BS I had force-fed down my throat in the mid-90s by Clintonistas to justify excluding me from consideration for Democratic Party leadership positions (note, I was a major Jerry Brown person in my state; I was the office manager for the Portland office in 1992). I had several Clinton supporters sneeringly tell me that my opinions about Party governance didn’t matter “because you’re going to just bolt to the Citizens Party anyway.”

Well, I wasn’t. And I didn’t. I did become less active because I needed a paying position, and given those statements were from people who were on hiring committees for the Democratic Party, I put my energies elsewhere.

Granted, all this is intra-party squabbling and how the sausage is made. I’m in agreement with Chaos-Engineer above that much of the rhetoric about not voting for Hillary is not coming from Democrats or Sanders supporters. Despite my dislike for what the Clintons did to the Democratic Party, I’ll hold my nose and vote Democrat this fall because the alternative is just too hideous. My experience is that this is the behavior of most of those who lean toward the Democratic Party anyway. Those who bolt based on ideology won’t necessarily vote Trump. They’ll vote Stein or someone else, but they sure won’t vote Trump (even if that means Trump gets elected per Nader in 2000).

Nonetheless, such assumptions seriously annoy me due to my past experiences and some very ugly memories of the excluding behavior of people who say such things. I know you are unlikely to mean it that way, but it’s still a knee-jerk reaction on my part.

Not the Reddit Chris S. says: “@Geoff Hart “Were I part of the DNC…” – you’re assuming some degree of competence from the DNC.”

I think that’s a compliment, right? *G* But yeah, I’m on record as saying that the DNC is actually a collection of Republican moles, since that’s a more plausible explanation than believing the DNC could be so incompetent purely on their own merits. But like John, I admit to having a cloudy crystal ball and a questionable track record.

Also, full disclaimer: As a Canadian, I claim some objective distance, but confess to some nearsightedness too.

I’m on Twitter a lot these days. The last couple of days, it looks like the Bernie Bros have been much quieter than usual. Maybe more of them were Republicans in Disguise than I’d realized; I’d expect the “true believers” to still be pretty active in social media.

George Herold:
For most of us here, the term BernieBro is a derisive term for one small but particularly vocal faction of Sanders supporters, not all of them. They don’t really seem to care so much about Bernie’s politics as the fact that he is the non Republican who is Not That Woman/Harpy/Harridan/(insert increasingly vulgar slur here). Now that there aren’t any male Democrat alternatives left, they make a lot of noise about how Trump would be better than Hillary Clinton and are probably hoping to scare people into voting against her. As with all things internet, it is really hard to tell how many of them are serious about it, and how many are just in it to start fires.

I can state for a fact that the number of BerneBros claiming they will vote for Trump in the general is non-zero, having run into one in real life.

BernieBro here signifying a (so far in my experience) male Sanders supporter, addicted to social media, prone to multiple FB and Twitter posts per day, with a content of roughly 40% pro-Bernie, 60% virulently anti-Hillary. They have been all male, and have uniformly used sexist imagery to refer to Hillary (she’s a prostitute, etc.). Yes Bernie disavows them, but most of his supporters that are vocal seem to defend them (this thread for example) so I’m sorry if it offends your tender feelings but BernieBros are a thing, I’ll keep using the term as I please, and if they’re not sexist they say sexist things, so I don’t much care whether they spend their days being actively sexist (a la Jay Smooth and “racism”.

Some people have taken to the less-sexist (as it were) term “berniebot” to describe those of both sexes who seem motivated less by enthusiasm for Bernie and more by a stone belief that Hillary is Lady Macbeth. Don’t know if they will go Trump-ward. I’d personally guess they will sit the election out.

I predict there will be enough Sanders supporters stomping off in a huff to power at least a few NYTimes trend pieces. I likewise predict they will make about as much difference as a fart in a hurricane.

I remember some Clinton supporters back in ’08 loudly threatening to vote GOP if Obama won. I trust we all know how that worked out.

@John – I rarely trouble your shores because you are good people and the majority of your readers are good people. And I’m a bit rough n rude.

However, I will offer you an explanation of why the Millennial Bernie supporters are reacting in the way that they are.

Firstly, they’re young and their processing of media is lightning fast – 5-8 hrs daily on the phone. Goldfish on Adderall and coffee.

Secondly, they got a taste of something in Occupy. They don’t see the underlying networks because no-one lets them in (Elitism in the Democrats is still a thing) but they kinda get how it works (not really).

Thirdly, their future (Student Loans, Debt, Economy about to crash again and little things like having to put off house ownership / children until their 30’s) strikes them as fundamentally unfair.

Fourthly: they grew up in the networked media, and can connect dots. Moreover, they want change.

Here’s a taste of the dots that prevent them from supporting HRC / the mainstream:

None of their complaints to this kind of thing rest solely on misogyny. That’s why I just chose three linked women activists: One of whom was a POC and who was assassinated for her beliefs.

They want equity in a system that denies it to them – and slapping them with insults isn’t the way forward.

That’s why they’re moving in the ways that they are: if you didn’t notice, the entire message from Silicon Valley has been DISRUPT for the majority of their lives, do you think that doesn’t work in different ways?

–

Hillary will still get 2016: but 2020 is going to need some serious introspection from Americans towards things, or it all falls apart.

REPUBLICANS 2016: WILLY JOKES AND BOOGERS AND MITT ROMNEY. MANANANANAAA. TOLD YOU IT WAS GOING TO BE GLORIOUS. WITNESS ME.

I think none of us saw Trump getting this far – including, I strongly suspect, Trump himself. Of course, now that he’s beaten all the “smart set” and is on track to being the popularly-selected Republican nominee he’s going to ride that Mad Torpedo – because his ego’s getting a 23-course banquet right now, so why would he want to quit?

I’m sure there’s a SF/Political Satire story in here someplace, about an egocentric blowhard who becomes Master of the Universe, and how he makes governing up as he goes….

I don’t vote for Center/Right Corporatists. I didn’t vote for Obama for that reason and I won’t vote for Hillary either. #FeelTheBern

SPOILERS: THERE ARE NO LEFT WING PEOPLE IN THE CONGRESS / SENATE.

Back to a normal voice: Flint water, Lead scandal.

Any sane country would be rushing in their with evac / emergency teams to sort the problem out. I mean, literally, yuuuuge scandal, Ministers losing jobs, companies being brought to court, death of political careers, back-deal boys (it’s always boys) removing them from the list of “the people who we choose to represent our country” and so on.

Even China would walk in, execute everyone responsible and then sort out the issue (*ahem* kinda. Actual solutions not guaranteed to also include lead poisoning. See next execution round)

The fact that that this hasn’t happened is 100% proof: The USA is no longer a functioning Nation.

I don’t understand how people get so caught up with political predictions. That’s all they are, all they will ever be: predictions. You may feel free to agree or disagree with them, but expressing such strong feelings of discontentment both over the use of the term “BernieBros” and over the prediction of their behavior if Hillary does indeed win the nomination seems a little excessive to me.

Personally, I find your political commentary to be entertaining and that’s why I read it. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t read it. I struggle to see why so many people feel the need to articulate their anger when the solution to their problem would simply be to not view the content (or to discredit it as wrong and just leave it be).

But I could just be grossly oversimplifying any comment section that has ever existed…

Sendaiben: only the true Messiah would deny his own Divinity. Take off one sandal and bow down before his sacred gourd.

Cthulhu has a few fair points. If she is limiting her comment to why some young people hate Clinton, then I’d say she’s right. If she thinks Sanders isn’t just a less visible part of the establishment or that he’ll be allowed to govern against the party, then not so true. My guess is she understands the distinction.

Any prediction comes with the risk of not just being wrong but being epically wrong. It’s hard to top “Not even God could sink this ship” but people do keep trying.

I don’t see many Bernie supporters, even those who express themselves like the “BernieBros” mantle suggests, supporting Trump. But I can see a lot of them just saying “What’s the use”, staying home and sitting on their hands. (And the same goes the other way, with Hillary supporters staying home). Fortunately, the Senate Republicans are doing a good job making sure there’s a big reminder of the stakes by keeping a Supreme Court seat open.

If BernieBro is defined the way people are using the term here, as a particular sort of internet-oriented misogynist rather than a Sanders supporter who’s saying something a Clinton supporter disagrees with, then I wonder if too much focus is being put on them. A group can be highly irritating on the internet without having anything like electorally significant numbers, especially depending on geographic distribution, and this group of people is lost to Clinton in any case.

Sanders’ polling numbers suggest he has other supporters – women of various ages, older people who self-identify as Democrats and have presumably voted for them before, young people who may need to be motivated to vote but who also may be capable of being motivated by a different candidate. All these people seem like they could become Clinton supporters. She’s won, for all practical purposes. To me, it seems like she’s already doing the work to try to bring the party together around her as the nominee. I sort of wish the internet would follow her lead.

@eselle28 – For the record, I think the term BernieBro is humorous and apt for the people it describes. I’m a 48 year old woman who lives in the Deep South and who would probably prefer Bernie but also thinks Hillary is just fine and will do a good job (certainly a better job than any of the GOP lunatic asylum escapees currently in the running). They may not, as you say, have electorally significant numbers, but jeeze – they’re annoying.

Also @Cthulhu – Dude! (male or female) Maybe you need to take a break from the Internet for a bit.

Well, I guess this is what we get for laying so many undersea internet cables. One of them must have been a little too close to R’lyeh.

To get back to the topic: there isn’t much chance that my state’s primary will matter, but I’m going to vote in the general election based on the candidates that I expect to have a substantial chance of winning, because I live in a sometimes swing state and the stakes are too high to do otherwise. But not everyone necessarily thinks that way.

I think Hilary will win the Democratic nomination. She is the chosen one of the powers that be on the right center…..errr…..left, and Bernie can do no more than pull Hilary a little to back toward the center. That said, I think everyone in the “D” camp realizes they face a truly golden opportunity to win the White House – at the very least – this election cycle and will do all they can to consolidate their forces after the primary battles. This will not please everyone in Liberal land, but it will be more than enough to defeat the raving lunatics on the right. That’s my take on it. Doesn’t mean squat, especially as I have been frequently wrong about events in the political arena and other things. I have no fucks to give about whether anyone agrees with me on this, and I don’t think you should either. So there!

You appear to have been bitten by your auto-correct. Or at least, I need a certain amount of clarification here:

” Sometimes it might look like I’m snorting ketamine and cocoa powder at the same time.”

Did you mean “coca” powder, which is the powdered leaf of the coca (pronounced ko-ka) plant, and which contains the active ingredients of cocaine; or did you mean “cocoa” powder, which is the powdered bean of the cocoa (pronounced ko-ko) plant, and which contains the active ingredients of chocolate? One of these leaves you with a white residue around the nostrils, the other with a brown residue. I need to know which you meant, so I can get the mental image right.

Sincerely,
A confused Aussie who doesn’t give a monkey’s about US politics, but is very particular about the content of her mental pictures.

So, we have reached penis measuring, unpredicted a mere three months ago. We have twice that many months yet to go. I invite everyone to look deep into their cloudy crystal balls and predict (seriously or not) which way in the political discourse is downhill from here.

Well all I have to say to Bernie or Hillary supporters is that if you decide to have a hissy fit because your candidate didn’t win and toss your voice to “a never gonna win not in a million years not in a quadrillion chances” candidate, and the GOP wins, YOU DESERVE THE SUPREME COURT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO LIVE WITH FOR THE NEXT 2 OR 3 DECADES!

Seriously, you deserve to have to re-fight those battles, uphill, while wearing 90 KG weights on each ankle. The rest of us don’t deserve it, the conservatives will be happy, but you, the hissy fitters, YOU will deserve it. And I will curse/mock/give the finger to each and every fucking one of you for the rest of my life.

Considering the acceptance of penis measuring as a presidential qualification, that might edge Sanders ahead somewhat although the women’s vote might be a problem. Perhaps her husband Bill might be acceptable as a substitute since he does well in that area. Certainly nobody in the running in either party can offer a sensible economic future since the overpowering economic forces irretrievably in control in both parties are hell bent in destroying the planet. A gold plated measuring tape with a presidential seal should be appropriate and a lot cheaper and simpler than all those months of million dollar nonsense the world is weary of.

I think the actual Sanders supporters who defect to Trump might be less numerous than pissed-off, nonaffiliated working-class white folk in Pennsylvania and Ohio who might have voted for Sanders, but will vote for Trump if Clinton is nominated.

Whether these people are more or less electorally significant than, say, African-American Clinton supporters in those states, Virginia and NC who would be more motivated to turn out if Clinton is the nominee than Sanders, I have no idea. It’s possible that they’d turn out anyway, so it’s better to concentrate on the more marginal cases from a min-maxing point of view.

But one doesn’t have a reliable set of what-if models of the general election when voting in a primary. I do know with 100% certainty that if Clinton is nominated and loses the general election, we will never hear the end of it from Sanders supporters, just as we wouldn’t if the situation were reversed.

About that Guardian article, bear in mind, these are vocal American readers of a left-wing British newspaper who voted for Donald Trump. I suspect they are neither typical Guardian readers nor typical Trump voters nor typical anything. But the prevalence of worse-is-better, heighten-the-contradictions thinking is interesting; it seems about half of them specifically support Trump because he is the most awful candidate, as some sort of punishment fantasy.

bookworm1398: Off topic, but reading the comments here its amazing how many people who are against racism have no problem calling Trump Drumpf. A certain lack of self awareness here.

I googled this topic and got S.J. Rosenbaum’s article on the subject; I also watched John Oliver’s original video, and I don’t really see that linking Trump to his family’s original name as a joke as racist. Rosenbaum’s final point–that Oliver is wrong in considering the connotations of the English word “to trump” to be too positive, because what we want to do is to “trump Trump” sort of misses the point that Trump is the trump, or trump-er; he’s spent decades trying to attach connotations of “win” to his name. (With mixed success, I admit, but he has been trying.) She’s on stronger ground when pointing out the long tradition of Americans attacking public figures by assigning them Jewish names (Rosenfeld for Roosevelt, for example, a tradition that Trump is part of with his tweet about John Stewart)–but the long shadow of anti-semitism is part of that tradition; I can’t see “anti-German” sentiment as ever having been as strong as anti-semitism in this country, except for a few brief years in the early 1940s, and I really can’t see why I should assume that “Drumpf” is a Nazi reference, even for Trump. It didn’t even occur to me that it was a German name, at first; I thought it was just funny-sounding. Does that make me lacking in “self-awareness”? Or potentially racist because even when I realized it was a German name, I still didn’t immediately think “Nazi!” but saw it instead only as a rather clever joke about Trump’s own well-validated hypocrisy, though one I don’t bother to repeat–a “funny-once,” in my opinion.

So . . . I guess what I’m asking is, are their people out there using the “Drumpf” joke to state–or even strongly imply–that Trump is a Nazi? Or to drum up “anti-foreigner” sentiment against him? Because if so, that’s silly. But I don’t think that simply using the name as a joke has the same implications.

I do know with 100% certainty that if Clinton is nominated and loses the general election, we will never hear the end of it from Sanders supporters, just as we wouldn’t if the situation were reversed.
My first question of those people would be “Who did you vote for?” and if it’s not Clinton or if they didn’t vote, then my take would be to tell them to STFU. Not voting invalidates your opinion in my eyes. It’s a trivial effort and not doing it because you don’t have your perfect, favorite candidate on the ballot strikes me as juvenile. Refusing to vote for, say, Clinton because you wanted Sanders is tantamount to a vote for the Republican candidate. Given how presidential elections work, the same is true for most third party votes. If you would have voted for one of the two major party candidates but decided to vote for a third party as a protest then you’ve effectively given the other major party candidate an advantage.*

“But it won’t make a difference, they’re all corporate stooges!!” is the typical rejoinder. I want people who say that to tell the Iraq War vets that the difference between Bush and Gore in 2000 was meaningless. Tell it to the injured, to the families of the dead, to the 20 or so who kill themselves each day because go PTSD. Go ahead, tell them it doesn’t make a difference who wins. Because while we can’t know, I think it’s much less likely that we’d have invaded Iraq under a President Gore. Differences don’t have to be sweeping, bold and obvious to be meaningful.

*This doesn’t apply to those who vote for a third party candidate for ideological reasons, of course. In those cases, the voter usually wouldn’t have voted for either major party candidate.

My prediction; – somewhere during the presidential debates Hillary will claim hers is bigger than Donald’s. I’m not sure if she’ll hold her hands up at the same time, but probably, just to remind people what she’s talking about.

But look at the responses: any sane response would be spitting blood, brimstone and outrage at reality. Any real attempt to provide reality leads to a denial – I mean, it’s cool that both Romney and Clinton are directly involved via cash funding to right-wing death squads.

I mean, those Mexicans are close! Instead of a Wall we should fund coups and deathsquads, right?

Instead a couple of weak notes that I should take a time out or that we can ignore the initial post (the one with the meat) in favor of the pantomime. Because, right: 100,000 poisoned kids is less worse than a bit of ranting?

Right. As long as you’re all cool with being modern day fascists, that’s ok. Ah, sorry: only the Trumps get that label?

YOU DO FORGET WHAT I AM SOMETIMES. AND YOU DON’T DESERVE TO SURVIVE IF YOU CAN’T FIGHT. BUT TRUST ME: YOU’RE THE SAME ON THE INSIDE.

What’s worse is thinking that the ranting is going to help the 100,000 poisoned kids. What’s worse is thinking that being the 87,000th person to come up with the “they’re all compromised/we’re all compromised” is fresh insight. What’s worse is thinking that that elderly and tired insight means that there’s no real choice between the GOP and the Democrats or between Trump and anyone else. What’s really worse is the stale, boring, and cynical apathy behind your performance art: *I’m* doing something; I’m not settling.

Supporters say they like Donald because he tells it like it is. But 74 out of 75 of his statements on were rated by politifact as varying degrees of false. John Oliver goes on to say he saw this first hand. Trump attacked his old boss, tweeting: “If Jon Stewart is so above it all and legit, why did he change his name from Jonathan Leibwitz? He should be proud of his heritage.”

THen around 17:58, he quotes one supporter who says they didnt’ know anything about Trump, but his name sounded like someone rich. Then John Oliver goes into a bit about how the word “trump” means all sorts of powerful things. And then he reveals that someone found out his family name. An ancester had changed it from “Drumpf” to “Trump”.

At which point, John Oliver tells Donald that Donald should change his name back, that Donald should be proud of his heritage, i.e. the exact attack that Donald used against Jon Stewart.

What’s worse is thinking that the ranting is going to help the 100,000 poisoned kids. What’s worse is thinking that being the 87,000th person to come up with the “they’re all compromised/we’re all compromised” is fresh insight. What’s worse is thinking that that elderly and tired insight means that there’s no real choice between the GOP and the Democrats or between Trump and anyone else. What’s really worse is the stale, boring, and cynical apathy behind your performance art: *I’m* doing something; I’m not settling.

You do realize that the following things are true, right:

#1 UK, EU, RU and a lot of other places don’t have this problem

and

#2 WWII happened and the entire continent was bombed and we fixed things.

Your *actual* point is that you can’t fix things due to your current system.

“Pundits exist to ameliorate the political version of “buyer’s regret.” ” please keep ameliorating! Your political posts are fantastic. i’ll take your cloudy crystal ball over someone who has made a living out of this any day. My two cents for what they are worth. :)

My actual point is that you have no idea what you’re talking about, and that you substitute bluster for insight. Hint: all the countries you mentioned have exactly those problems plus (just like us) others. Second, your idea of what happened during and after WWII is the History Channel version, starring Tom Cruise, and just about as accurate.

Graduate level questions: who did FDR sell out to pass the New Deal? How did Harry Truman hand an electoral advantage to the GOP for a generation?

I realize you think that all caps are impressive. I prefer actual insight.

My first question of those people would be “Who did you vote for?” and if it’s not Clinton or if they didn’t vote, then my take would be to tell them to STFU.

The vast majority of the Sanders supporters I talk to, even the vehement ones, take pains to make it clear that they will. There are a very few who say they’ll support Jill Stein or write in Sanders or stay home, but they’re the hardest of the hardcore and the others sometimes mock them (see, for instance, Erik Loomis’s posts about this on Lawyers, Guns and Money: he prefers Sanders pretty intensely over Hillary Clinton, but has nothing but contempt for the dead-enders who keep urging Democrats to throw the election on Salon and Huffington Post).

Reciprocally, speaking as someone who voted for Clinton, I would be thrilled to support Bernie Sanders in the event that he gets the nomination. Choosing between the two of them was a difficult decision, because they have a peculiarly complementary set of strengths and weaknesses; neither is as easy a pick as Barack Obama in ’08 (as I would say, obviously, since I picked him over Hillary Clinton in ’08). But I think either of them would bring some good things to the position.

I haven’t actually met any Sanders-or-Trump people yet; I suspect most of them are not the types who post a lot on the Internet, and that they’re probably better characterized as Trumpists who are Sanders-curious.

No, I’ll stick with the fact that you can’t make your case without all caps or multiple sequential posts. You’re masking a sad cynical apathy with lots of flourishes and hand waving. Take a nap. It’ll help.

At which point, John Oliver tells Donald that Donald should change his name back, that Donald should be proud of his heritage, i.e. the exact attack that Donald used against Jon Stewart.

That detail still wasn’t entirely fair, though: this particular story is a really common part of the American experience (my own German ancestors Anglicized their family name to “Turnipseed” in the early 19th century), and it wasn’t Trump who actually changed his family name, it was his grandfather. Furthermore, most evidence seems to imply that the name was originally Trumpf, not Drumpf, but that’s not as funny-sounding.

The more interesting thing in this regard is that Trump’s father used to claim that his parents were Swedish rather than German, supposedly to help relations with Jewish associates and clients after World War II.

But, more generally, I’m not greatly fond of “turnabout is fair play” reversals of attacks that were illegitimate in the first place.

I think the “If it’s not Sanders, I’ll vote for X or stay home” (where X is not the Democratic candidate) is the HillaryIs44 movement again. Lots of noise, no action. (And deeply ironic, because Clinton was in this exact situation in 2008 and handled it with good grace, supporting Obama to the hilt — and that race was much closer. And frankly, I think there was even more friction among supporters than now).

Honestly, this feels like deja vu.

Sander’s problem was the problem every “the young are enthusiastic!” candidate in a primary has faced: The young don’t vote. They’ll be enthusiastic all day long and way into the night, but come election day they just don’t show. Obama managed to win not because of the excited youth vote (which he did have) but because of other voters. Having the young vote heavily his way helped (and it was a darn tight primary) but without minorities he’d have lost badly. The youth aren’t enough. Even if they’re going for you 90-10, they just don’t show up. And in the end, it’s people in ballot boxes that win or lose elections. Not twitter rants.

2008 was a high-water mark for 18-24 year old voters. They jumped something like 10 points. The only age demographic to see a major shift. Even then, they were almost 10 points UNDER the 25-44 crowd. That’s how little they vote.

I suspect the allure of being “part of history” and electing the first black President had a bit more to do with that surge than Obama’s mysterious youth enthusiasm — but that’s speculation. (The fact that it dropped back to trend in 2012 could be either ‘Obama wasn’t magic’ or ‘Been there, done that’. Who knows?).

Would Clinton get a spike for being the first female President? I kind of doubt it (the first time you ‘make history’ is special. The second time always feels less so..). On the other hand, when it comes to young voters — women vote about 8 points higher than men. So perhaps so.

No, I’ll stick with the fact that you can’t make your case without all caps or multiple sequential posts. You’re masking a sad cynical apathy with lots of flourishes and hand waving. Take a nap. It’ll help.

David: in case you missed it, I provided you with 300% of the links in this thread.

Like, literally, if you tally up the outside references and knowledge in this thread, the tally is:

You: 0%
CTHULHU: 500%

Now, since you’re determined to be a big boy: what did you miss [that’s a Scottish insult, by the by] and what do you need explaining?

Since, you know- The Mad God has provided 500% more links than you in this thread.

I mean, seriously, you are on the internet where every level of satire, no matter how extreme, is trapped by Poe’s law. I honestly can’t tell if you’re actually, literally insane, and this is truly how incoherently you communicate, or if you are shooting for some form of really weird satire channeling dada-ism and random sci-fi-ish references. Because there really are people out there who will write this kind of stuff and are completely serious about it.

And if the point is satire, then I will just say this: if actual communication is your point, then it’s not working.

The Sanders phenomenon is fascinating to me. If you look at the issues, and his mostly decades-long positions thereon, there’s no rational reason why his strongest base of support would be white males. I always thought Sanders voters would be the liberals who wished they could be voting for Elizabeth Warren instead. That it doesn’t seem to play out that way gives me pause, but I still think there are very few Berniebros. Clinton has some real challenges in drumming up sufficient enthusiasm to vote, but won’t suffer substantial defections, I don’t think.

This is a strange time to be suddenly concerned with John’s preferences, given that he already informed you that you were doing two things you know he dislikes (drifting far off topic and posting multiple sequential posts). Or did you not see the inconspicuous, easy-to-miss big green box that was his last post on this thread, after which you have posted 15 more times?

@Cthulhu: “There’s is 100% no country who could be facing a massive multi-state wide catastrophe who ignored it. Unless they were all paid to ignore it.
‘Whelp, fuck responsibility, I got paid'”

Are we talking currently or historically? Because I can easily come up with one offhand. During the Potato Famine that decimated Ireland, England’s response was basically, “Lol, good riddance.” Despite Ireland being a part of Great Britain at the time.

“At least Trump supporters have integrity: That’s the selling point.

And it’s not something HRC has.”

If Trump supporters were running for President instead of Trump, that might be relevant. As it is, no, no, Trump doesn’t have integrity. I didn’t know it was possible for anyone to have less integrity than your average politician by such a huge factor, but here we are.

“Sanders and Trump tap similar wells of dissatisfaction, and if one is eliminated from the race, the other will pick up a non-trivial fraction of his supporters, ”

That’s horse manure.

Sanders and Trump tap opposite, mutually exclusive wells of dissatisfaction. If you don’t see that, I have to really question your perception of political events at all.

Trump is channeling the essence of old fascist paranoia and xenophobic ultra-nationalism. The guy parallels Mussolini and Hitler in so many ways, right down to the repeated slogans and use of brainwashing techniques in his speeches.

What Bernie Sanders stands for, and the reason that I and so many want him as our president, is because we’re tired of the status quo and the vested, powerful oligarchy basically shitting on people’s lives and well beings in the name of serving themselves and the military-industrial complex. The wellsprings could not be more opposite.

Trump is the very embodiment of greed and aggression and imperialism wrapped in fear and anger and ignorance.

The message Sanders has carried is: People deserve single-payer healthcare, they deserve educations they can afford without becoming debt-slaves, that women and minorities deserve equal pay and respect, that our democratic system should not be a slave to monied interests.

There might be a tiny, tiny few Bernie supporters that don’t really believe in his message and just want to watch the whole system burn. But to stay that Sanders is tapping into the same Nazi-like frenzy of hate that Trump is tapping is ludicrous.

“I always thought Sanders voters would be the liberals who wished they could be voting for Elizabeth Warren instead. ”

^^^ This.

I understand why Warren chose not to run, because she could see the writing on the wall and knew that the DNC had already chosen Hilary as their golden-girl, and would do absolutely anything, no matter how underhanded, to lock out any other candidate. But I still wish I was looking at a race between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders right now. Then I’d have a race where both outcomes would be happy outcomes, as regards to who becomes the blue candidate. Honestly, if either Sanders or Clinton win the nomination, I’m still kind of hoping they choose Warren as their vice-presidential running mate.

Compared to Donald Trump, or even to anyone in the GOP field at all, Hilary Clinton might look like a good candidate. If you take a step back, you can see that she is not. She’s a stooge for wall-street interests, incredibly dishonest, and has basically no political instincts at all. She might make passable statesman, but I think mostly her presidency would be one in which nothing changes, the status quo reigns, and economic inequality continues to increase.

That’s better than Trump (or any of the right-wing nutcases) but only in the way that continuing to live in a dusty house with rotting wooden beams and crumbling plaster is better than burning the house down and not having one at all.

To be honest, I find you to be quite rational about your political thinking, just like most people I talk to who aren’t connected to the media in any way, shape or form. I usually pay attention to the political mess on the state level, since that affects me more than the twits do on the national level. However, when I’d first heard that they were talking about how well hung The Donald was, my first thought was, “Really? They’re gonna do a porno promo on national t.v.?”

Well, no, that wasn’t really my first thought. First thought was, this is what the presidential election season has boiled to: it’s my ball, and if I can’t play, I’m gonna go home to my mommy and daddy.

If you look at the issues, and his mostly decades-long positions thereon, there’s no rational reason why his strongest base of support would be white males. I always thought Sanders voters would be the liberals who wished they could be voting for Elizabeth Warren instead.

I think there are several things going on.

The core of Bernie Sanders’ movement absolutely is the Draft Warren movement renamed. But Sanders also has crossover appeal to people who aren’t movement conservatives, but who, for many and various reasons, just hate Hillary Clinton.

That includes people who don’t want to vote for yet another member of America’s ruling oligarchy of famous rich people who enrich each other, and people with legitimate concerns about her foreign-policy positions.

It also includes sexists who don’t want to vote for a woman, and people who have absorbed 30 years of content-free propaganda about how Hillary is a ball-cutting harridan.

Meanwhile, my impression is that one reason most African-Americans, by no means all of them, but especially in the South and especially in older generations, have lined up behind Hillary Clinton is that they’re afraid, and with good reason. We’ve had eight years of a black President whose mere presence in office has caused overt and nasty white racism to flare up like it hasn’t in decades. There’s been a dismaying series of high-profile incidents in which young black men are killed by police or white civilians over some minor incident or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and violent white militant groups are getting restless. And now we have a probable major-party nominee who is spewing hate against whole minority groups and unsubtly using the playbook of a fascist demagogue.

If you feel as if you’re in the crosshairs of this, this isn’t a situation that would make most people feel like a revolutionary. This is a situation that makes you feel like you want a known quantity, a steady hand on the tiller, and someone who regards all this as of paramount importance. You especially don’t want a guy who, for all his good intentions and his old record of civil-rights activism, seems just a little bit tone-deaf when addressing the concerns of black citizens, has a reductive model of racism as arising from class conflict, and also seems to be trying to get crossover support from people who might be Trump voters. It’s rolling the dice when you’re betting your life and the life of your family.

Just the most serious point I can pick out of your posts. The rest of your ideas are so completely clueless that there’s no where to start with them. Just to take one, the idea that no other country has had a disaster created by Flint-like neglect and malevolence is belied by the entirety of history. Someone’s already mentioned the Irish Famine; I’ll add the famines in India in World War II; the Bhopal disaster; the Eastern European lead poisoning disasters during the Cold War; Chernobyl; the Aral Sea disappearing; Australian aboriginal sterilizing program; the Khmer Rouge induced famines during the 1970s; the Soviet induced famines in the Ukraine during the 1930s; the handling of Mad Cow Disease in Britain and Europe during the 1990s; and so on and so on and so on.

You think that this is horrible — that’s fine, I agree with you. But your profound ignorance and tendency to spew all over comment threads as if that’s usefully helping is not. You believe that Rome is burning and you’re sitting in a coffee salon declaiming loudly that the other patrons aren’t as worried as you are. It sounds impressive, but it’s really apathy masked as activism.

I think you have a point and may well be correct. But at the same time, I have also been hearing from several union members….and thus likely Democrat voters….that they prefer The Donald and don’t trust Hillary.

My micro sampling….case that is what personal experience is….includes a modest majority of men.

They tend to view immigration and the export of jobs as important issues. They also don’t trust Mrs. Clinton with anything more important than dirty dish water. (prudent, IMO)

I’m still a John Kasich guy. I’d rather vote for an adult that helped conquer the deficit back in the 1990s than any of these other…..folks.

I think our gracious host has a real point about a subset of Sanders supporters, and had one the first time. (I voted for Sanders, fwiw.)

Let’s look at our Trump supporter, shall we? It’s not just that they are an angry white person who thinks that the current system has short-changed them. There’s also a view economic competition that rejects a lot of free trade, and think that more tariff barriers wouldn’t be the worst idea. A general view of labyrinthine conspiracy theres, and the demonic nature of the opposition. And of course, there’s the view that Scary Muslims are Scary, and they’re very upset that anyone would call them bigoted – they’re just being rational!

It’s this last bit that really crystalized the problem of (again, a subset of) Sander’s supporters. I’ve noticed that in in my social sphere the fanatic Sanders supporter of 2016 was the Reddit rationalist of 2015; the ardent Sam Harris fan of 2014, etc. In other words, people of the left who are quite sure that Scary Muslims are Scary, and are very upset that anyone would call their unimpeachable logic about those often not white, often not from here bigotry, when it’s clearly their unassailable rationalism! (After all, Doctor Harris agrees with them.)

Last night, we certainly saw the demographic limits of Sanders (if we hadn’t the during the last month). For the conspiratorial world view, just look up the thread. Same goes with demonizing – for all they call it Faux News, the subset here will repeat every half-baked conspiracy theory Fox has put up about Hillary for almost two decades now as Gospel truth. And I’m continually struck by how its all the up-voting rationalists I know who turned into the most bitter Sanders supporters. So if Trump’s support is also angry white Islamophobes who think the establishment is a Conspiracy and that the current trade system is rigged, then I’d say there will be some non-zero Sanders to Trump voting.

What might Sanders supporters vote if Sanders is not on 2016 Presidential ballot (including not as Democratic party VP)?
From wikipedia Spoiler_effect page, 2000
“a poll of Nader voters, asking them for whom they would have voted had Nader not run, which said 45 percent of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, 27 percent would have voted for Bush, and the rest [28 percent] would not have voted”
A factor that could push Sanders supporters toward or away from the Democratic candidate, Clinton (in this ‘doomsday scenario’): In 2000, the US economy had been good for some years.
A factor that might push Sanders supporters to voting for Clinton: Sanders has been running as Democrat in the caucuses/primaries.

Sanders has given repeated indications that, while he may ride his campaign out to the convention sniping at Hillary Clinton from the economic left, if/when she is nominated he will endorse her and urge his supporters to vote for her. I imagine that at that point the only ones of this supporters who don’t go along will be a remnant of extreme dead-enders, similar to the ’08 Clinton PUMAs, who made more noise than they manifested in votes.

I’ll say that it’s not that I necessarily think that you are wrong. I just hope you are on the Clinton/Sanders side. I, for one, am voting Sanders because I don’t like Hillary’s hawkishness, and I don’t believe she has a vision of where she wants to lead the country. Sanders isn’t a hawk and he does have a vision.

That said, I will vote for whichever one wins the nomination. Because, unless Rubio wins Florida (highly unlikely right now) and Kasich wins Ohio, the Republican race is down to two terribly dangerous people and Trump is the better choice of the two. Of course, Trump is better than Rubio or Kasich right now too, given their pandering to the extreme right, misogynistic policies towards women, and flirting with dominionism.

I think some number of white blue-collar voters in Bernie’s base finding Trump a more natural fit than Clinton seems fairly likely, almost obvious.

Considering that a Trump-Clinton race would see a Republican pushing protectionism against a Democrat who was for the TPP before she was against it (not to mention a Republican attacking GWB vs. a Democrat who supported the Iraq war and whose foreign policy is more-or-less ‘moderate Republican warhawk’), I think there would be some interesting crossovers, both of traditional moderate Republicans supporting Clinton and old-school Democrats supporting Trump.

Will there be some motivated by sexism? Sure. Given how prevalent sexism is in our society, it would be silly to try to claim that there isn’t any among Sanders supporters, though I think it would be unfair to claim it’s the candidate’s fault.

In the same way, I’m certain that, in 2008, there were more than a few racist Southern Democrats who supported Clinton in that primary, and then switched over to support McCain against Obama. Is there a belittling nickname for that group?

Honestly, BernieBros? I feel like I’m back reading a Puppies discussion, with VD using cute nicknames to disparage people he disagrees with, but with you in the VD role. You can obviously use whatever terms you like on your own website, but to me, it makes you come off a bit Trumpian, yourself.

Will some Sanders supporters have sour grapes. Sure. Some Hillary supporters had sour grapes when she lost to PBO. But I actually think there is less of that this time round. Polls show that Hillary will be fine with Sander supporters if she wins the nominations.

On the other hand… the Cruz people and the Trump people seem much less likely to play nice with one another.

What I really think will happen is that Sanders will continue to position the Democratic Party and will be a strong Clinton supporter going into the election.

But don’t take my word for it, let me quote from God…

“The exit polls have asked Republican voters in seven states — here’s Tennessee, for example — whether they’d be satisfied if each of Cruz, Rubio and Trump won the nomination. Remember, these are actual voters — voters who gave Trump a win in six of the seven states where the exit poll asked this question — and not some hypothetical universe of “likely voters.” On average, just 49 percent of these actual Republican voters said they’d be satisfied with Trump. The numbers for the other two candidates were better, but not by much: 53 percent of voters said they’d be satisfied with Rubio, and 51 percent with Cruz.

You might wonder whether this sort of thing always happens during a nomination campaign. The short answer is that it doesn’t. By comparison, 79 percent of Democrats this year have said they’d be satisfied with Hillary Clinton as their nominee, while 62 percent have said so of Bernie Sanders.”

Just gonna say that there documented incidents of individuals. who purport to be Sanders supporter, that have engaged in Gamergate-style dogpiing and harassment of anyone they don’t deem pure enough (and oddly enough, they tend to be women or POCs). There’s a question on how large this segment is, but denying that this behavior occurs (and is intensely annoying to the targets) is kinda ludicrous.

Meanwhile, my impression is that one reason most African-Americans, by no means all of them, but especially in the South and especially in older generations, have lined up behind Hillary Clinton is that they’re afraid, and with good reason. We’ve had eight years of a black President whose mere presence in office has caused overt and nasty white racism to flare up like it hasn’t in decades. There’s been a dismaying series of high-profile incidents in which young black men are killed by police or white civilians over some minor incident or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and violent white militant groups are getting restless.

And let’s not forget that the Clintons have LONG dealings with the black community, have tried to be responsive to the black community and were in power where a large segment of the black population became substantially more affluent. Yet, some Sanders supporters (not Bernie Bros) have told me they were mystified by that support, even AFTER being told of all those factors.

That probably doesn’t help in differentiating the various segments of Sanders supporters.

RE: The VP pick.
I do not understand the people who want Elizabeth Warren as VP. Unless you become a dark underlord like Dick Cheney, it is a toothless position. An absolute and complete waste of her talent. If you like her, why would you want to cobble her like that?

And that lack of interest in anything other than the executive is part of the short sightedness of this “revolution”. You can’t have a successful revolution in our political system just by electing one man president. If we learned anything from the last 8 years, it is that Congress can and will determine which lofty goals get through. Leadership in the House and Senate is JUST as important as who is in the White House. The whole idea would have been more believable if there was an emphasis on people in the down ticket races who, if elected, would be with a President Sanders in achieving his agenda. We know he can’t do it alone.

Regardless of the nominee, pulling Senator Warren out of Congress for anything less than the TOP of the ticket would be a mistake. I don’t know if she even has executive office ambitions, (and frankly, I think too many people see the Presidency as the only end goal in American politics), but she’s too valuable a Senator (more so than President Obama was as a Senator) to stick into the backwater that is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.”

While your books are highly entertaining, your political views are entertaining too. You might consider taking off the liberal lens and help (with the power of your pen) move politics back towards the middle.

And that lack of interest in anything other than the executive is part of the short sightedness of this “revolution”. You can’t have a successful revolution in our political system just by electing one man president.

Seriously. Folks habitually want a “grassroots revolution” by using top down methods.

You know, it’s my impression that as a general rule of thumb, “don’t feed the trolls” has not led us to comment threads full of peace and enlightenment.

Although, actually, now that you mention it, our Gracious Host does have a model for this. So I just went and donated $1 for every one of Cthulhu’s posts in this thread to the Bhopal Medical Appeal (http://bhopal.org). $22 won’t do much, but it’ll help.

gwangung: “There’s a question on how large this segment is, but denying that this behavior occurs (and is intensely annoying to the targets) is kinda ludicrous.”

Yes, it has happened. Where it turns into bullshit is when *dismissing how large the segment is* becomes a backdoor way to legitmize it as a descriptor of an entire movement.

Bullshit.

The Bernie campaign and popularity and success isn’t driven by the *Bros*. Bernie himself has made a point to say he didnt want that sort of behavior in has campaign and rejected that kind of support. I believe is one could somehow do a magical survey, one would likely find the contingient of people who use the term BernieBros would be Clinton supporters.

Drumpf’s campaign is defined by its bigotry. Drumpf himself has a long history of racism and bigotry. Drumpfs campaign rallys are defined by kicking out anyone different looking.

That in no way describes Bernie’s positions or how he handles his rallies. And if one is going to dismiss what percentage of Bernie supporters are “Bros” to attack the entire movement, then it is admittedly underhanded.

I dont know how many women support Hillary simply because of her gender, but I am sure they exist. Does a term exist to label them? Would it be fair to try and define all of Hillary’s campaign momentum as being sourced only by them? Even if we have no idea how large the segment is? Because that seems to be the approach being used to justify the Bro term.

Alice: “I do not understand the people who want Elizabeth Warren as VP”

Bernie’s appeal is that he is willing to stand on principles and rejects the influence of big money. Of the people who are drawn to that and might support Bernie, one concern I see raised over and over is his age. He’s old, so he might die, so they are concerned about supporting him.

One simple way to remove that is pick someone as VP who has a track record of standing up to big money, fighting the oligarchy, and doing the right thing. Warren is the name who immediately comes to mind fitting that description.

Getting her as VP isnt about taking her out of the senate, its about getting a president who will stand up to wall street.

Personally, I was hoping Warren would have run for president, but my guess is she saw the Clinton machinery and decided it had too much momentum, too much money. But if Bernie could beat clinton’s wall street money machine, then Warren as VP would take care of the issue of Bernies age that worry some people. And maybe being VP would help Warren run for president after that (a la Bush Sr).

It doesnt have to be Warren, but it needs to be someone with a record of standing up to big money influence in government. Warren just happens to be the first name that comes to a lot of peoples minds.

Alice: “You can’t have a successful revolution in our political system just by electing one man president.”

No, but the same diffusion of responsibility that has congress people do shitty things is the same diffusion that makes people frustrated to see little payoff in any other individual race.

Besides, I can only vote for the seats in my state. I have always voted for who I thought were the best candidates, but history shows that hasnt been enough so far.

The thing about Bernie is that he has rejected superpac money and wall street money. And if elected, he would be the best hope for leading this country to overturn Citizens United with a constitutional amendment. He cant simply make it happen by fiat, but he could use his position to stump for it. You think Clinton is going to take a hundred million from Wall Street then turn around and lead the country to campaign finance reform? God no.

Drumpf? If elected, he would probably push for laws so that only multimillionaires can run for office, maybe require everyone to pay a hundred dollar poll tax to vote.

Drumpf is a leap towards oligarchy and fascism.
Clinton would be more status quo.
Bernie would be a return to voter enfranchisement.

The fact that there was not a single thing in their about electing state legislatures, or members of the House of Representatives, kind of underlines the point that this talk of “revolution” is a kind of flimflam. It’s a bit rich to ignore all that and talk about “voter enfranchisement.”

Yes, it is hard, and less visible to campaign at the state or local level. But guess what? That is adult life. The good stuff is hard. And if you want to know why there is a good deal of bitterness towards some of Sanders more ardent supporters, it very simple. These people dismissed as either part of the Ebil Establishment or the “sheeple” who just follow the leader are the ones who were involved before it was sexy, who worked for various progressive policies before a singe tweet was twittered or tumbl tumblr-ed.

They were there before the Sanders campaign, and if other past progressive insurgencies are to go by, they will be there after. I may have voted for Sanders, but I understand a lot of Clinton supporters anger at being denigrated by the summer soldiers of political activism.

Not to call out anyone in particular, but it keeps coming up, and seems like this thread needs some Sexism 101. Spoiler: Calling someone a “dudebro,” or even (gasp) a “BernieBro”? A LOT less sexist than you seem to think.

Young: “House of Representatives, kind of underlines the point that this talk of “revolution” is a kind of flimflam. …. Yes, it is hard, and less visible to campaign at the state or local level. ”

Yeah, uh, the vast majority of my taxes are federal and all international relations are determined at the federal level, and last I knew, stuff like war is federal. States have effects like whether abortion is available or hard to get, what is taught in schools, and gun laws, but I happen to live in a state where the state is fairly progressive and I dont have any major complaints. The other influence states have is gerrymandering districts, but again my state doesnt have terribly convoluted shapes for districts. So, the best place I see to put my focus is the federal level.

“But guess what? That is adult life. The good stuff is hard. ”

Hey, guess what, you wanna base your political strategy off a mutated puritan work ethic, thats your choice, but it neither proves your “life is hard” approach is correct or that it will actually produce the outcome you want.

your entire rant is based on an argumentum ad difficultem fallacy.

“the ones who were involved before it was sexy, who worked for various progressive policies before a singe tweet was twittered or tumbl tumblr-ed.”

So, you’re a political hipster and are mad political reform went mainstream? Or are you just going back to the “the hard path is the better path” thing again?

No, I’m angry at people who are woefully ignorant of how state politics work, who assume that a state is progressive because it all just magically happened, who obviously don’t really get the role of Congress, and just how much it has to do for an executive to be worth a damn, coming in and treating all of us who know these things like we are primitives who have not discovered fire. Look up what a “block grant” is, and just how much of Federal spending is handed out to the states in this fashion, before you poh poh the very real work that state governments do.

It is not a mutated puritan work ethic to tell you that your state did not have progressive politics simply because your virtue was such that you were entitled to them. It is progressive because a lot of people did the work before you and your enlightened presence were even aware of it.

You know, it’s my impression that as a general rule of thumb, “don’t feed the trolls” has not led us to comment threads full of peace and enlightenment.

That’s your criteria for whether a piece of advice is worthwhile or not? Provide complete peace and enlightenment or GTFO?

What about NO ONE SERIOUS USES ALL CAPS? Do you have a way to measure how much peace and/or enlightenment that’s brought to the party?

If everyone in the world listened to “don’t feed the trolls,” I don’t know if it would significantly decrease the number of posts from trolls. Could go either way. It would, however, significantly decrease the number of posts from people who, for reasons beyond my ken, apparently believe with all their hearts that they can talk some sense into the trolls, if only their posts are convincing enough.

That wouldn’t lead to comment threads full of peace and enlightenment, no, but I think it’d be a start.

That’s your criteria for whether a piece of advice is worthwhile or not? Provide complete peace and enlightenment or GTFO?

Er…taking that hyperbole a bit seriously there, are you? My actual criteria is whether not feeding the trolls has reduced the amount of trolling. Given Gamergaters and the toxic cesspit that is Twitter, I don’t think it has.

Imagine for a moment that I’m already aware that I’m unlikely to convince the troll to change their ways. To what audience might I have been speaking?

I’ve been for Bernie ever since he announced. I’m going to vote for him in the primary if he’s on my ballot. Never doubt, however, that I will vote Democratic in November pretty much regardless of the nominee. I’d bet that most Bernie supporters feel the same way.

My biggest concern is this: The DNC seems more concerned about Bernie than they do about THE SAME VOTER SUPPRESSION TACTICS THAT LOST THE 2000 ELECTION. Well, we won in 2000, but voter suppression made the fraud perpetrated by Katherine Harris and the Supreme Court possible.

So as a Bernie Bro, my message for the DNC is this: Don’t worry about my vote, you’ve got it locked up. But messing around with my candidate to influence the nomination will just piss me off. Go spend some of that super PAC money registering voters in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Crivens! Show me that you have the brains of a beetle!

Yes, but my point is that since my state is progressive right now, then I should focus on the federal level. Your point, as best as I can tell, is that my state is progressive right now, but I haven’t thanked you nearly enough for all the hard work you did to get it there.

Greg, I believe youngpretender was going back to Elizabeth Warren, the point is to reiterate that VP would be a waste. See again: “…who obviously don’t really get the role of Congress, and just how much it has to do for an executive to be worth a damn, coming in and treating all of us who know these things like we are primitives who have not discovered fire.”

Back with Alice, you treated “I do not understand the people who want Elizabeth Warren as VP” and “You can’t have a successful revolution in our political system just by electing one man president” as though they were separate points, replying to them in separate comments. But they’re not, they’re all of a piece. You said in reply to the latter, “I can only vote for the seats in my state,” but another thing you can do is value Warren’s place in Congress over and above her potential place as a VP failsafe for Sanders’ age.

Sorry, I could be wrong, and wouldn’t try to speak for youngpretender, but maybe if I’m right and can clarify misunderstandings this won’t escalate to the point where Scalzi has to break out the hose. *shrug*

Looking at all this from an Otherplacian outsider’s perspective, the funny thing is how close Clinton and Sanders are, ideologically. Sure, he’s more to the left than she is, but they both are on the left flank of Democratic party as a whole; they agree on a lot more things than they disagree, and have quite similar (though not identical, of course!) goals, with the bigger differences being in how they want to achieve those goals.

I think a lot of the vehemence, then, is because of the same effect that makes many Young-Earth Creationists more angry at evolution-accepting Christians than at outright atheists: you expect the Enemy to disagree with you on everything. But when it’s the people like yourself, who you feel should agree with you on everything but don’t… that gets a lot of people really angry.

Marcy: ” I believe youngpretender was going back to Elizabeth Warren, the point is to reiterate that VP would be a waste”

yp chastised me because my response contained nothing about “electing state legislatures. YP then took it down to the local level telling me how hard it is.

Yes, it is hard, and less visible to campaign at the state or local level. But guess what? That is adult life. The good stuff is hard.

Young then complains about how some of Sanders more vocal supporters have dismissed youngpretender as either part of the Ebil Establishment or the “sheeple”” when youngpretender is in fact one of “the ones who were involved before it was sexy, who worked for various progressive policies before a singe tweet was twittered or tumbl tumblr-ed.”. YP wants us to know we must never forget ““It is progressive because a lot of people did the work before you”

youngpretender isn’t trying to go “back to Elizabeth Warren”. Youngpretender is trying to make the conversation about youngpretender and all their years of hard work. Bernie supporters are just a flash in the pan and have been saying people like youngpretender are “sheeple” when they should be thanking yp. The US might not be a democracy were it not for all the hard, difficult, back breaking, thankless, may cause anal leakage, arthritis inducing, and oh yeah, *hard* work that yp has been doing for, like, decades, you know, before tweeting even existed….

Speaking of Warren and why folks might want to focus at the federal level, the head of Clinton’s political machine, DNC’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz, just launched an attack against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. DWS received big money donations to get rid of CFPB. Thanks, Clinton political machine!

The thing about the divide between the two is that it is not all that large, absent discussion of finance, which is big. There’s a lot of “I’m not sexist, but…” still in American politics, and Clinton is being bit by some (emphasis some) of this in the Democratic party nomination process. There is also the fact that the right wing medias has been repeating various smears of Clinton for more than decades now, and by repetition some of those stories have a tint of fact to them now, and get repeated as Gospel by people who often otherwise disdain the conservative media (For good reason).

@Greg.

They should not be thanking me; I was only in for six years. I voted for Sanders, so I have seen other people dismiss Clinton supporters as this. Considering that many of these supporters have sterling records – long hours working against our states’ attempt to ban gay marriage, and then for its per Windsor and Obergfall legalization, support for highly liberal Federal candidates, I did find it faintly ridiculous to see people sweeping in to enlighten them about progressive politics after seeing a few particularly pithy tweets.

I am saying, that many of these enthusiastic Sanders supporters should not assume that they are the only ones there, and should not respond to being reminded of this with profanity. They should not respond to be being reminded of the many less visible, less sexy parts of the system with insults and contempt. And that many would do well to remember that making a political movement is the work of years, and if you react to being reminded of that with invective, the rest of us are under no obligation to take you seriously.

So much of politics is coalition building. So yes, I don’t really take people who pooh pooh that as serious.

@Marcy Yes, that was what I was trying to point out. Thinking at a federal level also means thinking strategically about the Congress you would be looking at, not just the executive. At a federal level, a Senator Warren does a President Sanders much more good than a Vice President Warren would. You can’t afford to lose an ally, who has such similar views to Senator Sanders’ vision, who is already in a position to help get it executed in Congress.

And thinking strategically, while it is obvious the VP pick will have to be younger than Sanders, you don’t want it to be a younger version of Sanders- that is wasting an opportunity. Anyone who has been drawn to Sanders’ message enough to vote for him in the primaries is going to vote for him in the general if he’s the nominee, regardless of VP. Right? None of them are going to change their minds and think “I love his message, but he’s old. What if he dies after 2 years- and that VP who is more moderate takes over- it’s not worth the risk, I’m staying home or voting for Trump.” I think that’s very unlikely among people already passionate about Sanders. So you don’t need to have a “back-up” Sanders as VP to ensure their vote. It’s a lock.
Obviously, you need someone who is willing to work with Senator Sanders vision of America, but I don’t see his followers changing their minds about voting for him because the VP isn’t far left enough. But you could use the VP pick to broaden the appeal of a far left, very liberal candidate, to moderate voters, without having to sacrifice on message- because everyone knows the VP does little.

VP picks are often selected because they bolster a perceived weakness in the candidate. They can broaden their appeal. It would be a waste of a VP pick to select someone so similar to the candidate. And a bigger mistake to pull a potential ally at the federal level out of a position that could influence the success of the Sanders Administration’s agenda,to put her into a position of less power.

TL;DR Don’t draft Warren to just sit on a bench for 8 years in case Sanders dies. It is a waste of her skills and ultimately would cost any potential Sanders administration a useful and important ally in the Senate. Draft someone young enough who would not be leaving a strategically important position and possibly could pull in general election voters from the middle. Even if their campaign contribution records are not as pure as Bernie’s- and whose are?- 1) I don’t think any Sanders supporter is going to believe Sanders could be drawn to the dark side by his VP’s influence, and 2) No one who would otherwise want to see Sanders elected would chose NOT vote for him out of mistrust of his VP’s potential actions in the possible event that Sanders died. Unless perhaps Sanders drafts Cheney.

Youngpretender: “So much of politics is coalition building. So yes, I don’t really take people who pooh pooh that as serious.”

Haha. No, I dont think so. If “coalition building” was your point, you wouldnt have started off with a broadside shot against those dern, young bernie supportin whipper snappers, tweetin and textin. You are no coalition builder. You come across as a cranky old fart who feels shortchanged by the new kids who havent thanked you sufficiently.

“Coalition building” is just a retcon attempt to justify the cranky “get off my lawn” reaction.

“these enthusiastic Sanders supporters should not assume that they are the only ones there”

Waa. Who cares. People have been “there” for years and look what they have to show for it: elections are for sale, and a fascist is leading the republican nomination. The results suck.

“many would do well to remember that making a political movement is the work of years”

Except it doesnt. All the new tech that old farts like to poo poo? They have changed the landscape of what is possible. Old problems still exist. But new solutions are available. The Arab Spring flared up in a couple months. The problem of totalitarian government didnt go away, but that flare up wasnt possible even 10 years before that.

“and if you react to being reminded of that with invective, the rest of us are under no obligation to take you seriously”

Well, you dont take them seriously in the first place. So why would they bother with you? And since you start off not respecting those who dont first profusely thank you for your years of toil, trials, and tribulations, its just easier to go around you.

You have a preconcieved notion that its going to be hard work, take years of labor, toil, and trouble. And you have zero respect for anyone who disagrees with that worldview. Meanwhile, the kids are out and about, getting things done. Hell, Obama being elected was due to young voters mobilizing. But you poo poo that as too flashy, not boring enough.

You want to build coalitions? Then stop dictating that everyone must have at least as many spoons as you and spend them the same way you do before you will consider them part of your “coalition”.

Warren as Clinton’s VP would be an incredible waste. To me, the only reason to pay the price of losing Warren in the Senate (and, by the way, having her replacement named by a Republican governor) is if you’re looking at the longterm, and you believe that this paves the way for her to succeed Hillary in 2024.

… which seems incredibly unlikely. A single party holding on to the White House for five straight terms would be, well, not unprecedented, but I think things have changed a bit from FDR/Truman’s day.

Indeed, I think holding on to the White House for four straight terms would be pretty unlikely. My expectation is that the consequence of Clinton/Warren winning vs. Trump/Cthulhu in 2016 is President Cruz in 2020, leaving Warren with the future political prospects of such luminaries as Dan Quayle.

(Conversely, I think President Trump in 2016 gives a decent shot of President Warren in 2020. Is paying that price worth it to get a President Warren instead of a President Cruz? I don’t know. If you had asked me in 1999 whether it would be worth having hapless bumbling GWB in office in order to get the first black President and a moderate level of health care reform, I might have said yes, without knowing that the cost would really be endless war in the Middle East and Roberts/Alito on the Supreme Court.)

Absent an aberration like Cheney, a vice-president is just a symbol. I think Elizabeth Warren in the Senate is far more important than having her be a trophy liberal on Clinton’s arm.

It’s starting to sound like ALL the candidates’ supporters are basically Glenn Close saying “I’m not going to be IGNORED.”
There’s problems with all of them–they’re politicians, after all.
So Hilary is taking money from Wall Street–she’s enough of a politician that she’ll take the money and then do something they don’t want if she sees the advantage. After all, if she becomes President, what else is there to strive for?
I’m afraid poor Bernie is being set up by his followers to accomplish things that may not be possible–he’s going to have to make compromises and then listen to the wailing of the disillusioned.
I just wish the election would get here already.

“you believe that this paves the way for her to succeed Hillary in 2024.”

Uh, primaries should be over by june/july. If Bernie gets the nomination, then he could choose Warren. And it seems most running mates are picked around August. If Hillary gets thd nomination, then Bernie throws his support behind Hillary and does not run as an independent and so doesnt need Warren or anyone else as vp.

I know Hillary supporters like to demonize bernie supporters as Bros, but the vast majority of Bernie supporters are not Bros, and a large majority would be horrified if Bernie ran as an independent splitting the vote from Hillary and letting the GOP or Independent/Trump win.

The Warren as VP path would only make sense if Bernie manages to overcome the political machinery that is the Democrat party superdelegate system and corporate influence pushing for Hillary to win. Then it would be Bernie as president for a term or two, followed by Warren.

Likening the VP spot as a dead end via Dan Quayle doesnt fit Warren in any way. Quayle was an idiot, a lightweight far out of his league, and a shmuck.

As was mentioned in another thread here a while back, Warren is 66, thus she would be 70 or 74, in 2020 or 2024, respectively. Even though the actuarial tables say someone will live x number of years after 74, they are not necessarily going to be years of full vitality and maximum effectiveness. Maybe a Senator or a Justice can slide along, but a President is going to be busy and under stress 24/7.

Frankly, Clinton, Sanders and Biden are all a bit too old to be optimal presidential candidates, but I would vote for Carter or even Bush the Elder, at their current ages, before any of this year’s Republican contenders.

Care to see how well the Arab Spring is doing these days? It’s not exactly the best advert for assuming that people can sweep in and change everything. Every new technology is heralded as being about to change everything – and politically, it all comes down to building a coalition and keeping it together long enough to matter. No app can change the fact that if a coalition can’t appeal to a certain critical mass of people, it will go nowhere.

And while you are at it, you may want to reflect on privilege, namely, yours. You may look at a world and say that nothing has been done. Someone who is LGBTQ,might have a different reaction to this. For all the horrors of the police interacting with those not white today, it’s better than it was 50 years ago. All of these things you take for granted, that your state is progressive, that your life is secure enough that you can just focus on the Federal candidates, are not written in stone. They are not an entitlement.

The people who do not feel that it is as set in stone will look at the two candidates, and will vote for the one they like better. Part of this like will flow from feeling that a candidate who can hold a coalition together is their best shot at not losing hard-won gains. This does not make them sheeple or old people wanting you to get off their lawn. It makes them people who feel they are less insulated from the threat Cruz and his ilk pose, and who very rationally vote for the candidate who they feel can keep the wolf away from the door.

Fourteen electoral votes concentrated in the northeast, where the Republican Party is generally not competitive at the presidential level, is simply underwhelming.

Here’s a simple thought experiment: Consider the Electoral College dynamics that a Cruz-Trump ticket would enjoy at the outset:

– Cruz is from Texas (Red State): 38 electoral votes.

– Trump is from New York (Blue State): 29 electoral votes.

Cruz-Trump would start with 38 virtually guaranteed electoral votes in Texas. With Trump on the ticket, New York State might come into play. If that happened, the Democratic ticket would need to commit greater resources to keep New York from turning Red on election day—resources that might tip the balance in Sander’s favor in other battleground states.

Should Sanders win the nomination, he will need a VP candidate who can broaden his campaign’s appeal geographically as well as demographically.

Sanders would be well advised to vet VP candidates from competitive states with loads of electoral votes, preferably Red or Purple. Such a choice could stretch the electoral battlefield, perhaps forcing the Republican ticket to expend greater-than-expected resources to nail down their electoral base.

Tad Devine is Sanders top adviser with the most presidential campaign experience (Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry). Devine has to know all this and would likely counsel Sanders against choosing Warren.

youngpretender: Care to see how well the Arab Spring is doing these days? … politically, it all comes down to building a coalition and keeping it together long enough to matter. No app can change the fact that if a coalition can’t appeal to a certain critical mass of people, it will go nowhere.

Seriously? Now you’re just being a jerk. Arab Spring failed because people in power were willing to murder to stay in power and had a military willing to carry out those murders. No amount of your stupid, naive, idiotic coalition would have stopped it without force of arms. The Arab Spring folks can be forgiven for being naive. You on the other hand cannot let a single post go by without mentioning all the years you’ve worked in politics, which tells me, those six years you spent in politics were on par with running the mimeograph machine, rather than running for congress. All your constant talk about all your experience in politics, and you’re more naive than the Arab Springers.

You may look at a world and say that nothing has been done.

No, no. no. Look, you have missed this point three times at least. My point wasn’t that nothing was done. I fully admit that the world is far better than it was centuries ago, even decades ago, and in some aspects mere years ago. My point was that you don’t deserve any thanks for it.. According to you, the most important thing in politics is “coalition building”. You can’t shut up about it. Even when it would result in mass murder, you seem to think all it would take to stop a war lord or a brutal dictator is for people to just get together and chat until they build a coalition. First of all, that’s such a naive view that its why I assume you worked the mimeograph machine in your political career. Second of all, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart:

you suck at coalition building.

Certainly, coalitions have their place in politics and can solve problems within a certain set of parameters. But you are clearly incapable of building a coalition. The entirety of your focus on this thread has NOT been on getting people with different backgrounds and different worldviews to find some common ground and work towards some shared goals. Rather, the entirety of your posts have been nothing but you relating that when you are faced with people with similar goals but slightly different worldviews, that you dismissed those people completely. The behavior you are describing having done, is the exact opposite of coalition building. The thing you keep going on, and on, and on, and on about being teh absolute most important thing in politics? You have no demonstrable skills in actually doing it.

I look at the world and see that plenty of people have focused their efforts in making the world a better place. THe only thing you’ve focused on on this thread was the lack of acknowledgement you got from those young whippersnappers who failed to fully appreciate those years you devoted to progress. That’s what you actually talked about. Those are the actions you reported on doing. Not building coalitions. But being entirely insular and tribal. Yes, coalition building is important. In fact, maybe you should try it sometime.

Pedro: Sanders-Warren makes ZERO sense

Yeah, political suggestions for the Democrat party from an anti-Democrat? Not worth a whole lot.

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